Text inside upload field

[Paul Wilhelm Elsinghorst]

Hi,


I googled a lot and read that it is impossible to have some text displayed
in an upload field. Lets assume I don't fear the security problems that
arise from this. Is there any chance that I can display some text in
there? I'm working on an edit dialog and want to display if a file has
already been uploaded. So something like "Already uploaded" inside the
upload field would tell the editor to upload only in case of replacing the
file.


So, any ideas?


Paul

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

I googled a lot and read that it is impossible to have some text
displayed in an upload field.

You didn't google sufficiently. Check
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/file.html

Lets assume I don't fear the security
problems that arise from this.

That's rather irrelevant. Browser vendors use security as a lame excuse for
not implementing file input ("file upload") properly, and they aren't
really interested in what you or I think about security.

Is there any chance that I can display
some text in there?

Surely, for users who use Opera. But of course the text there should not be
just "some text" but a useful default value for the filename.

I'm working on an edit dialog and want to display
if a file has already been uploaded.

An "edit dialog" can mean a million things.

So something like "Already
uploaded" inside the upload field would tell the editor to upload only
in case of replacing the file.

No, that would be a completely wrong approach.

I have no idea of how you are going to recognize that the file has already
been uploaded. Certainly that would require tools external to HTML. But if
you can determine such a situation, it should of course be expressed
_before_ the upload field.